Gather a list of techniques to illuminate people who are trying to sell you a red herring. We do critical thinking all the time in a basic way when we try and d

Gather a list of techniques to illuminate people who are trying to sell you a red herring. We do critical thinking all the time in a basic way when we try and determine if an advertisement for a product is 'bull ship' or not. It's likely you are going to do a lot of automatic and basic critical thinking on the answers in this thread. The same principle is used to filter your own mental direction, thoughts and assumptions. It's like panning for gold. Panning for gold involves sifting through a river of dirt to find specks of gold in your sieve. You're training your thinking to analyze out all the words and meanings that could trap you and find the specks of gold. Critical thinking and analysis is very helpful for programming problems you find hard and/or debugging some nightmare you've accidentally created. Challenging your own historical reasoning, thoughts and assumptions helps save you from your own programming hubris. It's possible to become reactionary to new information or too closed off, if you over-analyze everything. You might not notice the real things you need to analyze in life until much later. Analysis isn't protected from your personal beliefs, they will be a soft spot for jumping to conclusions. It's a narrow path and the answers you find might not be the ones you wanted when you started.